Guide
How to get mentioned in AI answers
Ask a chatbot this and you get the same five points every time: earn mentions, write clearly, get into the roundups, add schema, then monitor. All true. None of it tells you which to do first — and the answer changes completely depending on what you sell.
Start here
There are two kinds of category, and they need opposite strategies
Answers built from ordinary pages
We measured solid wood furniture: fourteen buyer questions, 110 pages recorded. Sixty per cent of what the chatbot read was a company’s own page, forty per cent was buying guides, and not one page was a paid directory.
In a category like that, writing works. You get into the answer by publishing something.
Answers built from lists
We measured our own category: fifteen questions, 135 pages. Seventy-one per cent of what the chatbot read was a listicle, and the companies named were the ones on those lists.
In a category like that, publishing your own page moves very little. Being on somebody else’s list is what counts.
Same method, opposite conclusions. Anyone who hands you the five-point checklist without telling you which category you are in is guessing.
Twenty minutes, no cost
How to tell which one you are in
Write down ten questions your buyers really ask
Buyer questions, not brand questions. “Best [thing] for [situation]”, not “is my company any good”.
Ask each one in a fresh chat, with web search on
A fresh chat each time, so nothing earlier colours the answer.
Ask which pages it used, and open them
Every time. The pages are the evidence.
Sort those pages into three piles
Companies’ own pages. Articles and guides. Directories and paid listings.
Whichever pile is biggest is your strategy. If it is the first two, write. If it is the third, your leverage is getting listed, and another page on your own site will not do much.
If writing is your lever
Write for the questions that named nobody
Look for the questions where the chatbot named no company at all. In the furniture measurement, six of the fourteen were like that — the chatbot answered with advice and quoted whoever had written a decent guide.
Those are the cheapest ground on the board, because there is no incumbent to displace. The page that wins them usually has three properties.
It answers one question, in its title
Not “Our Products”. The question itself, worded the way a buyer would type it.
It concedes something
Pages that admit a downside get quoted. Pages that only sell do not. Say where your product is the wrong choice.
It contains a fact only you have
Your real delivery times, your actual duty rates, what you learned after five years of returns.
On the evidence so far
What does not work
- Paying for directory placement, in any category we have yet measured. Across 110 furniture pages and 135 in our own category, we have not seen one paid directory cited in an answer. That may change. It has not yet.
- Writing about yourself. A page about your company answers a question almost nobody asks. The chatbot is looking for the answer to the buyer’s question, and your About page is not it.
- Doing it once. Answers move between runs. A page that got you named in March may not in May. The only way to know is to ask the same questions the same way, repeatedly.
We run this on our own category too
The method does not get a pass because it is ours
We measure our own market with the same frozen question set, on the same schedule, and the findings change what we publish. That is how we know the advice on this page holds — and where it does not.
It is also why the first thing on this page is a test rather than a tactic. The five-point checklist is easy to repeat. Knowing whether it applies to you takes a measurement.
Find out which category you are in
We will write the questions, ask them, and send you every answer and every page cited. The first one is free.